Research

Segmentation-Aware Convolutional Networks using Local Attention Masks

October 22, 2017

Abstract

We introduce an approach to integrate segmentation information within a convolutional neural network (CNN). This counter-acts the tendency of CNNs to smooth information across regions and increases their spatial precision. To obtain segmentation information, we set up a CNN to provide an embedding space where region co-membership can be estimated based on Euclidean distance. We use these embeddings to compute a local attention mask relative to every neuron position. We incorporate such masks in CNNs and replace the convolution operation with a “segmentation-aware” variant that allows a neuron to selectively attend to inputs coming from its own region. We call the resulting network a segmentation-aware CNN because it adapts its filters at each image point according to local segmentation cues, while at the same time remaining fully-convolutional. We demonstrate the merit of our method on two widely different dense prediction tasks, that involve classification (semantic segmentation) and regression (optical flow). Our results show that in semantic segmentation we can replace DenseCRF inference with a cascade of segmentation-aware filters, and in optical flow we obtain clearly sharper responses than the ones obtained with comparable networks that do not use segmentation. In both cases segmentation-aware convolution yields systematic improvements over strong baselines.

Download the Paper

Related Publications

February 27, 2025

Integrity

Theory

Logic.py: Bridging the Gap between LLMs and Constraint Solvers

Pascal Kesseli, Peter O'Hearn, Ricardo Silveira Cabral

February 27, 2025

February 06, 2025

Speech & Audio

Meta Audiobox Aesthetics: Unified Automatic Quality Assessment for Speech, Music, and Sound

Andros Tjandra, Yi-Chiao Wu, Baishan Guo, John Hoffman, Brian Ellis, Apoorv Vyas, Bowen Shi, Sanyuan Chen, Matt Le, Nick Zacharov, Carleigh Wood, Ann Lee, Wei-Ning Hsu

February 06, 2025

February 06, 2025

NLP

Brain-to-Text Decoding: A Non-invasive Approach via Typing

Jarod Levy, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Svetlana Pinet, Jérémy Rapin, Hubert Jacob Banville, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Jean Remi King

February 06, 2025

February 06, 2025

NLP

From Thought to Action: How a Hierarchy of Neural Dynamics Supports Language Production

Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Jarod Levy, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Jérémy Rapin, F.-Xavier Alario, Pierre Bourdillon, Svetlana Pinet, Jean Remi King

February 06, 2025

April 08, 2021

Responsible AI

Integrity

Towards measuring fairness in AI: the Casual Conversations dataset

Caner Hazirbas, Joanna Bitton, Brian Dolhansky, Jacqueline Pan, Albert Gordo, Cristian Canton Ferrer

April 08, 2021

April 30, 2018

The Role of Minimal Complexity Functions in Unsupervised Learning of Semantic Mappings | Facebook AI Research

Tomer Galanti, Lior Wolf, Sagie Benaim

April 30, 2018

April 30, 2018

Computer Vision

NAM – Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Mapping without Cycles or GANs | Facebook AI Research

Yedid Hoshen, Lior Wolf

April 30, 2018

December 11, 2019

Speech & Audio

Computer Vision

Hyper-Graph-Network Decoders for Block Codes | Facebook AI Research

Eliya Nachmani, Lior Wolf

December 11, 2019

Help Us Pioneer The Future of AI

We share our open source frameworks, tools, libraries, and models for everything from research exploration to large-scale production deployment.